Western voting
Western voting is the presumption that in national elections in the United States , the announcement of polls or election results on election day could have an impact on voting decisions or turnout. Because of the four time zones of the US mainland, the polling stations on the west coast are still open, while on the east coast election results are already being counted and published. The time span is even greater when all states and outlying areas with their nine time zones are included.
This fact is used by electoral and political research to test various hypotheses on voter behavior, which relate in particular to the influence of the publication of polls on voter behavior. Examples are the follower effect or the underdog effect .
The investigations carried out so far allow the conclusion that the effects on voting behavior are negligible. There was an American study on this as early as 1966 that came to the same conclusion.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Jochen Groß: The prognosis of election results. Approaches and empirical performance . VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2010, ISBN 978-3-531-17273-6 , p. 40 .
- ↑ Jürgen Maier, Frank Brettschneider: Effects of survey reporting on voter behavior: An online experiment on the state elections in Baden-Württemberg 2006, Rhineland-Palatinate 2006 and Hesse 2008 . In: Nikolaus Jakob: Social research on the Internet: methodology and practice of online surveys . VS Verlag, 2008, ISBN 3-531-16071-0 , p. 326ff.
- ↑ Bundestag election: How the Sunday question affects journalists and voters - Finances, Market & Opinions. Retrieved September 30, 2019 .
- ^ Thorsten Stegemann: The Americanization of media coverage. Retrieved September 30, 2019 .
- ↑ Harold Mendelsohn: Western Voting and Broadcasts of Results on Presidential Election Day. In: The Public Opinion Quarterly. 1966, accessed September 30, 2019 .